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Concept of ‘Month’ is detrimental to supply chain performance.
We have seen umpteen cases of seemingly irrational actions taken by companies towards the end of every month. Teams take their eyes off consumers and focus on their internal performance metrics. They push stocks to their channel partners, offer bulk discounts, extend credit, etc. These actions do nothing but create bullwhip effect.
A well-known company in FMCG sector tried changing the definition of month to tide over this problem. They redefined the month to start on 26th and end on 25th. The teams spent a lot of time, effort and money in rejigging their data capture, reporting and analytics systems. Do you think it improved their performance?
Of course not, it wasn’t supposed to. I understand the company has now reverted back to the earlier definition.
Consumers don’t care whether your month ends on 25th or the last day of the calendar month. All they want is your products to be available and fresh on shelves when they want to buy them.